The Tributaries and the Lake

 

For decades, our perception of “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski has been characterized by a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia — a label that may have saved his life, but doesn’t quite seem to add up in terms of diagnostic criteria. The Tributaries and the Lake explores the possibility other factors were at play in this man’s head, including potential trauma and a deeply painful sensation of being ostracized. I compare my own psychology to that of Kaczynski, raising the question “Have we been wrong this entire time?”

With input from brother David Kaczynski, and the inside perspective of someone with PTSD, my first nonfiction work attempts to delve into the life and torments of one of America’s most notorious criminals.

 

E. J. HAAS is an investigative journalist and author currently based in Alaska, covering public safety and the criminal justice system on scales ranging from day-turn court reporting to records-intensive investigation.

Haas earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, serving as a graduate research assistant for Investigative Reporters & Editors in the process.

 

 

Chapter I: The Second City

On May 22^nd of 1942, Wanda Kaczynski became a mother.

Her life hadn’t been the easiest, growing up under her own matriarch Mary Dombek — who, according to Wanda’s younger son David, was a “chronic alcoholic who frequently flew into rages during which she was physically and verbally abusive to her four children.” He would later speculate Mary “was self-medicating with alcohol to quell the suffering brought on by an underlying [unidentified] mental illness,” but would never meet her: she died in her fifties of a stroke, leaving Wanda the title of “daughter” with no mother to show for it.

Like her husband Turk’s parents — like my own great-grandparents, maybe not unlike a handful of your own predecessors — hers had come to America in search of prosperity and contentment. The four Polish natives immigrated so their children would live during a remarkable time for the United States job force, in which Turk (legal name Theodore) made his living making sausages: wages and work conditions steadily improved. Technological advances helped ease the average work week from 53 into 40 hours following World War II.

It was the promise of stable, simple living that attracted them both to Chicago.

Today, the third-largest city in America is populated by some 2.7 million people and has one of the world’s highest gross domestic products. It bursts with both capital and culture; even the poorest and deadliest neighborhoods’ bridges are illuminated by the creations of street artists with skills challenging Banksy’s. Each mural conveys some message of hope or unity, or a celebration of the local culture — of an unmistakably Chicagoan persistence to flourish. Even as the rising Lake Michigan encroaches like an impending siege on our borders, and the crime in both our gangs and our law enforcement bodies erupts the streets into protest — we trudge on, just like we do through the brutal winter snow.

In spite of everything against us, the city refuses to do anything less than survive.

And so it makes sense this couple forged their family here, and that they’d welcome their first son in Evergreen Park. Theodore John was born a beloved, “happy baby” who burbled and cried like any other. His little brother David would say he’d been “laughing, active” even. Baby Ted showed no signs of maladjustment and was brought home in perfect health.

Just over sixty years later, on the edge of the same city, arrived a brutally large-headed newborn shortly after noon. With an umbilical cord around my neck, and an illness I still don’t know the nature of, I was taken from my mother before she could see me — which she only did several hours later, following my father’s insistent pleas that “she needs to see her baby.”

In West Suburban hospital, they named me Ella Jane Haas.

Like Ted, I was loved from the instant I arrived. I took my first screaming inhalation in Chicago — and like him, I was raised in one of its suburbs.

Oak Park, too, boasts a lush creative culture. In high school I walked the same halls Ludacris once roamed. I served four faithful years on the school newspaper for which Hemingway once wrote. Somewhere in this village, Betty White lived a short fraction of her childhood.

Alongside artistry and academia, we value the character and integrity of our community. It is an expectation, no matter your religion, to love your neighbor and to do what you can for the good of those who need it.

It’s easy to wonder where Ted’s path diverged from mine — how someone so adored could go on to instill the fear that earned him the “Unabomber” moniker. The widespread consensus, thanks to Dr. Sally C. Johnson, is paranoid schizophrenia.

I’m not sure I agree with her.

Ted and I had similar upbringings, down to the isolative “gifted” status and little brothers upon whom we doted relentlessly, in a city built to withstand anything — from devastating fire to heated political turmoil. Chicago instilled within both of us a burning need to aspire toward something greater than ourselves. He, of course, skipped two more grades than I did; in spite of all our parallels he shone even brighter.

I was still brilliant. By age three I discovered a passion for reading, which first came to fruition in 2020 when I published my first book — but as smart as I am, I’m not a psychologist. I don’t claim to be one.

However, I’m not unfamiliar with trauma. This is one more trait I share with Ted despite our drastically different routes to the same destination, both at the age of 16.

I was one of the youngest, arguably least mature, students entering junior year of high school in 2018. I had no interest in men aside from envying them. I’d never kissed, or been on a date with, one. My life revolved around the Trapeze student newspaper, the philanthropic art club I co-founded, academics, and golf — at which I wasn’t too inept. I was on varsity, and so was she.

I’ll call her Ruth. She was a teammate one year older and a few strokes worse than me, with whom I was cultivating a tentative but eager friendship.

She was everything I didn’t see in myself: popular, extraverted, liked instead of admired. She fit into femininity like a key in a lock. She stood aloof on the pedestal I put painstaking effort into shining, too blinded to see it for the heap of dirt it was.

With our link still in its early stages, she made a proposal: “Let me set you up with someone.”

I declined before I knew his name, citing my being busy, and thought that’d be the end of the story. After all, I was too sharp to waste time seeking men I didn’t want. I believed myself too strong to let one of them slam my head against the floor and cover me in a Pollock work of my own blood.

The first day of September that same year, I was sleeping over at Ruth’s when she alerted me she’d invited “company.” Upon my insistence she tell me who was coming, she said one of these guests was an almost-boyfriend of hers.

The other, to my abject adolescent horror, I’ll call Jack, and he looked at me with contempt — like a dog does a meal — from the start. Even more so than at Ruth’s initial suggestion, I had a raging urge to stay far away from this boy. Being alone in a room with him filled me with unease.

So while Ruth and her almost-boyfriend went into the other room, I pretended Jack didn’t exist. I scrolled through the settings app on my phone, pretending to read something important, and replied in monosyllabic animal grunts to every sexual question this stranger asked.

“Do you want to?” he asked.

“No.” I shuffled away.

And then, several times in one night, he raped me. There is not much else to tell. I incurred injuries I didn’t know were possible, and I staggered around two in the morning into my local Walgreens to pay in full for an emergency contraception pill I hadn’t wanted to need.

It happened approximately ten times over the course of two months.

Nobody wants to go home and tell their parents they’ve had their first intimate experience with a violent stranger on someone else’s basement floor — that they fought and cried and did everything in their power to change the story. So naturally, I didn’t tell anybody. It was also the first time in my life I kept a secret from my best friend.

I went home the next morning. I ate the fruit in the fridge. And fifteen months later, I got a phone call from my mother in tears.

“Did you send somebody pictures?” she choked into my ear.

I didn’t know he’d filmed the rapes until he was threatening to send these videos to my 80-year-old grandmother who worked at the high school. He wasn’t quite sure what he was blackmailing me for.

But there is nothing on the planet more unstoppable than a man who feels he has been wronged. I blocked him, lay back in bed, and waited for the world to fall apart beneath me.

Initially, I tried to play dumb.

“No,” I told my mom slowly.

“I don’t know if this is some sick joke —”

This. I had no options; my grandma had gotten an email.

I began to cry. “He made me, Mom; it was Jack — he, he made me.” I let out a gasp. “I’m sorry, Mom, I —”

She kept crying. And from there I would retell my whole story to cops who probably don’t remember my name. I’d be denied an order of protection by a judge who never looked up to see my face; I would endure examinations against my will: as a minor, my parents told me, I had no choice.

I was more exploited in courthouses, hospitals, and police stations than in any basement. From there, the seed of an idea grew that I might be a good lawyer, but that is another story.

This one begins in December 2020, when fresh out of my legal nightmare — in the month Jack was arrested — I read “Industrial Society and its Future.”

This is how my path crossed Kaczynski’s: his writing concise and ideas articulated, he sounded perfectly lucid to me. I agreed with him, as do many figureheads in academia to this day. Nowhere did his doctrine stray into the territory of a madman’s ramblings.

I learned he was born in Chicago, where he excelled at Sherman Elementary School and went to Harvard at the age of 16. He came from a family of “civic-minded” people, where his mother suspected he lived with autism. He was deeply protective of his brother, if introverted and bookish, and excellent beyond comparison at mathematics. He had an IQ of at least 167 in the sixth grade, which he skipped along with the eleventh. Sometimes, he was prone to outbursts of anger fueled by overwhelming rejection. But he loved his family deeply, his brother most of all, and he was kind to animals in a way most children were not.

At college he was subjected to an abusive study, one that would go on to change his life forever and for the worse. But he graduated Harvard with a GPA of 3.12, and he pursued his master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Michigan. And still, there, he was a superstar in his field. He was offered a teaching position, and this compelled him to reject acceptances from the University of Chicago and the University of California in Berkeley.

But he was consumed by a gender identity crisis, one he would claim was purely sexual in nature. In his shame, he first considered killing somebody.

For years Kaczynski had railed against the technological world and its limitations on human liberty, but had done little more than write about it by then.

The year 1967 rolled around, and he began teaching at Berkeley. Despite being abrasive toward students, he was on the path to tenure — and highly esteemed — when he resigned on June 30, two years later.

After two years living with his parents, he and his brother David built a cabin in Montana where he began living off the grid. Supported by his family — with whom he gradually stopped making contact — and the occasional job, he survived without electric power, a water faucet, or a phone. It was here he began his murderous rampage, characterized by mail bombs built with precision and expertise.

He killed three people and injured several others to make a statement — all the while becoming more withdrawn from his family, to an extent that worried them deeply. He selected his victims because they symbolized everything he went against: technology, its threat to the environment, and its restrictions of individual liberty.

In 1996, “Industrial Society and its Future” was published in the Washington Post after Kaczynski promised to cease killing should a major newspaper publicize his personal philosophy. It was David’s wife who recognized the writing, who prompted him to go to the FBI with his suspicion Ted was behind the bombings.

He was arrested on April 3 of the same year. After his lawyers unsuccessfully attempted an insanity defense, Dr. Sally C. Johnson diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia.

Wikipedia states

Sally Johnson, the psychiatrist who examined Kaczynski, concluded that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz said Kaczynski was not psychotic but had a schizoid or schizotypal personality disorder. In his 2010 book Technological Slavery, Kaczynski said that two prison psychologists who visited him frequently for four years told him they saw no indication that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and the diagnosis was “ridiculous” and a “political diagnosis”.

On January 21, 1998, Kaczynski was declared competent to stand trial by federal prison psychiatrist Johnson, “despite the psychiatric diagnoses”. As he was fit to stand trial, prosecutors sought the death penalty, but Kaczynski avoided that by pleading guilty to all charges on January 22, 1998, and accepting life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He later tried to withdraw this plea, arguing it was involuntary as he had been coerced to plead guilty by the judge. Judge Garland Ellis Burrell Jr. denied his request, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld that decision.

This is all confirmed by external sources, including articles published throughout the trial.

I gawked upon learning he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He was too clear and self-aware, too ideologically sound, to be labeled delusional — and again, I’m no psychologist.

But a friend of mine, whom I’ll call Ryan, was studying to become one at the time. He liked my manic rantings and he talked like a therapist, whether discussing his or my vices or whether I was teaching him about the Madonna-whore complex. We talked often about socially deviant ideas and behavior, and so over frantic texts at three in the morning — on my third day without sleep, December fourth of 2020 — I told him what I believed.

He agreed with me.

“He eventually snapped,” I told Ryan, “as a result of [multiple] traumas.”

“It doesn’t justify what he did at all, but it shows our country created the Unabomber out of Ted Kaczynski, in a series of failures to take mental health and PTSD seriously, and that at some point he really did lose power over who he became.”

“That last part is a good description,” he replied.

I’d done a fair bit of learning about Kaczynski’s life after reading “Industrial Society and its Future,” and it hadn’t exactly been the easiest one to lead. Certain events proved very clear turning points for the worse, each warping Kaczynski’s worldview and self-worth into something less recognizable by even David.

The Unabomber, I proposed, was not insane but the product of complex trauma.

Ryan asked a question. “Do you think you’re seeing all this… because of your own experience with PTSD?”

That’s exactly it. The behavior and patterns were familiar to me; I recognized parts of Kaczynski that in me were labeled symptoms. It was his ideology, and the way he chose to promote it, that earned him a “delusional” label — but it was a sound school of thought, and it wasn’t wrong.

We knew it then, more so than ever.

“When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man,” he writes. “But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price.

“Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway.”

COVID-19 had shifted life to the internet, so that in order to be alive one had to be online: nearly half of our senior year of high school took place in Zoom rooms. Access to a computer and smartphone was no longer a luxury, but a necessity — and in using these devices, you accepted the truth your data would be sold to organizations you never knew the names of, or why they needed it. You became a commodity in the technological system.

Kaczynski came as close as any man can to predicting the future.

If anything, he was more clear-minded than the rest of us.

“So what makes you think he was traumatized?” asked my friend.

Chapter II: Mama

When I think of Wanda Kaczynski, I have difficulty trying to crown her single most remarkable virtue. The many dimensions of her extraordinary personality confound me more than the average case.

At nine months old, baby Ted broke into mysterious hives. She and Turk — always the caring, attentive parents — rushed him to the hospital where he would stay in near-isolation for a week.

“He was terribly afraid,” Wanda would later explain to David. “He thought Dad and I had abandoned him to cruel strangers… [that] we didn’t love him anymore and that we would never come back to bring him home again.”

Time is different when you’re young, without the years an adult has behind them. To a child, everything is of utmost weight. Every disappointment is the greatest in the world; minutes are longer: it is one 21-millionth of a 40-year-old’s life. At six months old, a minute is an entire 262-thousandth.

That difference in proportion is colossal. And without the language to understand what’s happening in the world around you, an abrupt separation from your parents into a frightening and hostile environment is the most terrifying experience you’ve been through to date.

It may have been for Wanda and Turk, too.

“I ponder endlessly over it,” she said to the Washington Post in 1996. And her younger son did, too.

In his essay “The Walking Wounded,” David describes his learning about what came to be known as Ted’s “hospital experience.”

“I was probably seven or eight when I first approached Mom with the question ‘What’s wrong with Teddy?’” David wrote.

“‘What do you mean, David?’” his mother had responded. “‘There’s nothing wrong with your brother.’”

There may have been. At that point, Ted’s baby book detailed some concerning changes in demeanor that never reverted.

“Feb. 27, 1943… Mother felt very sad about baby,” she wrote. “He is quite subdued, has lost his verve and aggressiveness, and has developed an institutionalized look.”

Thirteen days later: “Baby is… quite unresponsive after his experience. Hope his sudden removal to hospital and consequent unhappiness will not harm him.”

It continued to affect both her and Ted. There is evidence that at the age of four, seeing a photograph of himself as a helpless, restrained baby was still ingrained into his memory as deeply upsetting.

“Oh, my God,” thought Wanda. “He’s having the same feelings that he had when he was held down that way.”

“‘I mean, he doesn’t have any friends,’” David said to Wanda, roughly ten years on. “‘Sometimes it seems like he doesn’t like people.’

“Mom must have sensed that I needed more than reassurance,” he recalls.

“‘Sit down, David. I want to talk to you about something that happened before you were born.’”

He seated beside her on the couch, where she would read him stories like Tom Sawyer or Wind in the Willows. “But now,” he says, “she told me one about my brother’s early life.

“‘When Teddy was a little baby just nine months old — before he was able to talk or understand us — he had to go to the hospital because of a rash that covered his little body. In those days, hospitals wouldn’t let parents stay with a sick baby, and we were only allowed to visit him every other day for a couple of hours.

“‘I remember how your brother screamed in terror when I had to hand him over to the nurse, who took him away to another room. They had to stick lots of needles in Teddy, who was much too young to understand that everything being done to him was for his own good. He was terribly afraid.”

David writes he “really can’t do justice to [his] mother’s capacity for drama.” This may have been what he gleaned from her story — and he knew her better than I ever could — but as an outsider, one remarkable trait of hers stands out to me.

Wanda Kaczynski’s greatest asset lay in her ability to nurture, to stimulate, to learn and foster the desire to do the same in her sons (David, often overshadowed, was also an intellectual of astounding potential): in her boundless ability to love. Even on her deathbed with the knowledge of her elder son’s fate, David’s memoir “Every Last Tie” says “nothing could possibly mean more to Mom than to hear Ted’s voice again, to know that her love — and all the complicated emotions bound up with it, the unique bond between two extraordinary people — was acknowledged in the end.”

As a sick baby, and still as the most infamous domestic terrorist in American history, Kaczynski was a man loved by his mother. And David knew it: before her death, he called in the wake of her “failing health” begging Ted to contact her.

“Nothing would mean more to her,” he pleaded through tears. He broke down sobbing to the chaplain at the thought of Ted “being offered a chance — one irrecoverable chance — to make his heart whole.”

Indeed, the love of a mother carries such power. Endless research has proven the developmental detriments of extended maternal neglect or separation: one 2006 study, from the Journal of Anxiety Disorders, found “teachers perceived the children of Druze working mothers as having more problematic behaviors than [children of] non-working mothers, pointing to poorer adjustment… A crucial balance of separation and closeness provides an optimal context for meeting the needs and promoting the development of both mother and child.”

“Loneliness in family,” the study adds, “leads to maladjustment.”

In addition to social and emotional benefits, physiological needs are satisfied by mother-child contact. When deprived, a baby may become maladapted on a neurobiological level.

Former director of Columbia University’s Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychology, Myron Hofner, studied a collection of infant rats separated from their mothers.

He found “early maternal separation can result in a series of traumatic emotional reactions during which the child engages in an anxious period.”

You see it in every creature that relies on connection to live, down to my cat Dorian whose oral fixation betrays his abandonment. The love of a mother is as sacred as the need for water, for warmth.

Due to a lack of “bodily contact, nutrients, and other physiological interactions,” eighty percent of young rats taken from their mothers developed stress-induced stomach ulcers.

Today, such extended and abrupt separation from a parent — and at such an early age — as Kaczynski’s is widely regarded as inhumane. There is a reason the doctors complied with my father’s insistence upon seeing and holding my newborn body: my mother’s need for me, and mine for her, transcended the constraints of medical efficiency. The doctors recognized that more important than rushing me into recovery, in that moment, was the primal need for maternal affection — to be held, to be consoled, to be given love by a person whose DNA was half of my own and whose brain was flooded with hormones compelling, commanding her to see her baby.

And though our bond would evolve through tumult and confounding, this urge would never leave her system. Throughout my manic and depressive spells she didn’t quite understand, in all my mistakes, she loved me as any competent mother would — as Wanda did Ted. I would grow up difficult, often fantasizing about leaving her in my past by cutting contact, and know every time I didn’t have the heart to do it. No matter how much I hid from her, and how much I wished it wasn’t true, I would always need my mother’s love.

It is the saving grace of Harry Potter, the downfall of Kanye West, and Hemingway’s greatest torture. The presence of a mother, and stable family structure in general, increase children’s math and reading test scores as well as their chances of graduating high school. According to MARRIpedia, “over 57 percent of children who live in intact biological families enter college, compared to 32.5 percent of children in stepfamilies, 47.5 percent of children in single-parent families, and 31.8 percent of children who live in families with neither parent present.

“Students from disrupted families are less likely to complete four-year college than their peers from intact biological families.”

The attention of a parent makes all the difference in the world. Wanda knew it, Turk knew it, and my own father did too.

Ted experienced no academic shortcoming as a result of his “hospital experience:” he was brilliant long before he skipped sixth grade.

“I thought of my brother as smart, independent, and principled,” wrote David in “Every Last Tie.” “I wanted to be like Ted… Once I saw [him] fiddling with something at the back of the door. He was ten or eleven at the time but always an ingenious person… He had taken a spool of thread from Mom’s sewing kit, and a nail from Dad’s tool kit in the basement. I watched as he removed the last remnant of thread from the spool, leaving only the bare spool. Then he inserted the nail through the hole in the center of the spool and hammered it onto the lower part of the wooden screen door. When he was finished, he said ‘Dave, see if this works!’ All of a sudden it dawned on me what he had done: he’d crafted a makeshift door handle for me.”

David, then a tiny child of three or four, had been too short to freely let himself in and out of the home using the regular doorknob. Ted took it upon himself to make his little brother’s life easier, in a feat of intellect also proving him his mother’s son.

“Even after I got older and no longer needed it,” said David, “the spool remained attached to the door for some time — a lingering reminder of my brother’s kindness.”

I am lucky to have not been a stranger to the love of a brother. In the aftermath of my extortion it was Niko who treated me the most like a human being — who wrapped me in his arms without pity and held me close to his tearful chest.

“I’m so sorry,” I remember him whispering, “I didn’t know.”

I would later recall his kindness in a fight with my mother, in which I chastised her for reducing my person to my PTSD — because this dehumanization in itself proves a new trauma.

For weeks in March after the email was sent to my grandmother, I felt nothing. My health became a concern among teachers, who commented on my dramatic drops in participation and body weight. Ryan, with whom I shared a class at the time, noticed it too.

“What happened to you?” he asked me one time after class. I didn’t have a good answer.

In that stretch, I was closer than I’d ever been to dying. There was a chance I’d never recover, that I was forever resigned to lay in my bed crying all day and dreading the idea of falling asleep. Recently I found a series of journal entries from that time, detailing my scattered thoughts at the peak of my symptoms. Many of them are somewhat detached from reality.

“I’m trying hard not to grow bitter and distant,” I wrote the evening of March 4. “Reality feels like it’s slipping away. Every time I tell the truth I get punished, and even [my therapist] feels against me. Only one person has been able to make me laugh or smile in five days.

“Niko has never treated me like a victim. Tonight he did my laundry for me, and he made me cry laughing with a story from driver’s ed[ucation.]”

I should clarify I wasn’t laughing so hard I cried; I’ve never had a laugh that strong. I cried because he giggled while telling the stories; I was brought to tears seeing that amidst the damage done to our family, he was still able to find joy and amusement in his own life. I cried at the relief I hadn’t broken him down to my level of dysfunctional, deathlike apathy.

“I have a feeling if I get through this, it’ll be because of him. I have to do this for him.”

Like me, Ted cherished the bond of brotherhood. He saw himself as David’s guardian, and David as his best friend. In a childhood without close acquaintances or love interests — no doubt the result of his two grade skips, sixth and eleventh, which left him isolated and asocial — little David was the most profound connection he ever forged.

These grade skips would result in Kaczynski being admitted to Harvard on a scholarship at the age of 16. And while “growing up, [David] never doubted [Ted’s] fundamental loyalty or love or felt the slightest insecurity in his presence,” those confidences would begin to erode as his older brother went on to incur more trauma in college — where I went seeking possibility and new experiences, and where I too was manipulated to the extent I doubted my own reality.

Chapter III: The Era of Utmost Unhappiness

Henry Alexander Murray graduated Harvard University in 1915.

He suffered a childhood of depression due to a poor relationship with his mother; this is speculated to have catalyzed his interest in the study of personality psychology.

What makes us each who we are — what is it we really grieve when we lose someone? When my grandfather died in 2009, I was keenly aware at my seven years that something was lost beyond recovery. Not even were his body born again, in the exact same timeline, with the exact same life experiences, could he be replicated. Even were he still my mother’s father, I would sense something just slightly different — something wrong — something not quite my Papou.

Each of us is a fleeting wonder of sentience; it is an absolute marvel to behold someone’s authentic self and see what their time has made of them. No one of us will occur twice in the lifetime of this Earth.

The human personality takes an eternity to construct and an instant to shatter.

Murray, fascinated by its complex nature, pursued the study of what makes us people. He was deeply interested in the work of Carl Jung, the father of the idea we are all inextricably connected: humanity shares a collective consciousness with our peers and ancestors; we are the same.

Thus, what we inflict upon others we must also do to ourselves. That is, if you want to think in the context of karma.

He married at 23, cheating on this wife long-term with research collaborator Christiana Morgan, and went on to earn his Ph.D. at Cambridge. He was also a skilled athlete, described by Harvard Magazine as “one of psychology’s original voices, but… sometimes overlooked today: in part, perhaps, because his personality led him into unnecessary battles with fellow psychologists over what could be considered valid research, and because he enthusiastically began projects that he obviously cared about, yet never completed —” eerily reminiscent of the many times I thought I’d never finish this work.

Dr. Henry A. Murray’s life is one worth examining: Alston Chase has studied it also, referring to him as a “wealthy and blue-blooded New Yorker.”

“Murray… was both a scientist and a humanist,” Chase says in the Guardian. “Before the war he had been the director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic; during it, he served in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, helping develop psychological screening tests for applicants and monitoring military experiments on brainwashing.” He also provided a profile of Hitler’s personality, alongside “suggestions for dealing with him now and after Germany’s surrender.”

It is speculated Murray’s government involvement didn’t end in World War II: he also earned his renown in the world of psychology through a number of experiments that would be considered deeply unethical by today’s standards. One of these took place between 1959 and 1962. It was theorized, but never confirmed, to be part of an effort to learn how to break the psyches of spies in the war known as MKUltra.

“Henry Murray’s experiment was intended to measure how people react under stress,” says Chase.

Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men, as it was titled, “focused on stressful interpersonal relations, designing confrontations akin to those mock interrogations [Murray] had helped to orchestrate for the OSS.” It provided little initial information to volunteers and would later subject them to 200 hours of verbal beration and physical stress over the course of three years.

A subject code-named Cringle recalls “a sensation somewhat akin to someone being strapped on the electric chair with these electrodes... I really started getting hit real hard... Wham, wham, wham!” he told the Guardian. “And [I remember] me getting hotter and more irritated and my heartbeat going up... and sweating terribly...”

On the evening of March 14, 1960, “Dyadic Session #12” with Ted Kaczynski was recorded and transcribed. I received this transcription from University of Michigan philosophy professor Dr. David Skrbina — with whom I was in close contact throughout the completion of this project, and under whom I helped found the Anti-Tech Collective nonprofit organization. It was Skrbina’s conviction, as well as mine, Kaczynski showed no signs of delusion or dysfunction.

For some context, Skrbina read Industrial Society and its Future and saw validity in Kaczynski’s claims. Wanting to know more, he wrote to his address in prison with questions about his vision for the world in the absence of technology.

The two have been in close written contact since 2003.

“I would say [Kaczynski does] not [suffer any pathology],” he told me in a 2022 interview. “Based on the… dozens and dozens of letters I’ve received from him, and just indirect information that I’ve received in the past few years of what he’s doing and thinking.

“I mean, it does not sound to me like he’s lost his rational capacity in any way …that’s not to condone the crimes, obviously, but…”

He describes the correspondence he’s received from Kaczynski as “respectful,” “well thought-out,” and “what you would expect of someone who’s earned a PhD and can conduct a high-level rational argument.”

He also sent the PDFs of two sessions to me via email, as quoted below.

“I ought to warn you,” began a man called Mr. Shea, “before I start this, that I do not have a favorable impression of you.”

Shea tore into a criticism of Ted’s personal philosophy — his most intimate beliefs about the world — often throwing in personal attacks.

“If you feel that you’re weak, that you shouldn’t project the necessity of being strong, i.e., to override other people and everything else, which I think is exactly what you’ve done [in your philosophy] and I think you’ve taken your own shortcomings and attempted to compensate for them.”

“Well, you’ve been saying…” Connected to electrodes, Ted trailed off.

“All the psychological experience…” continued Shea.

“Yeah, well,” he said, “all through this thing you’ve been saying… You haven’t given me any arguments or reasons. You stated that, uh…”

“No, Mr. Kaczynski, I just formed an opinion of you and it’s not particularly favorable, I don’t, I don’t…”

Ted stumbled through a cluster of words, unable to finish his sentence.

“On this, on this, don’t interrupt me, please,” said Shea. “On this avoiding of society, or of this society as a bad thing; is that why you’re trying to grow that beard?”

“No.”

“I mean, are you conforming with the non-conformists?”

“No, I’m not conforming with the non-conformists.”

The two proceeded to interrupt one another, turning the conversation turgid with blatant personal attacks into an argument.

“I mean, really, this isn’t a beard yet,” said Ted.

“You’re darn right it’s not.”

“I’m well aware of that,” he replied to Shea. “But now, you’ve been just applying a lot of labels in attacking me, you have not given any logical reasoning, you have not, uh…”

“Oh, Mr. Kaczynski, I don’t know if you’ve been following it or not, but I think they’ve been quite apparent.”

“No, you’ve just been applying labels,” he said.

These studies were designed to be abusive, degrading, and manipulative. It shows in Shea’s words.

“I mean, what’s the matter,” he asked at one point, “can’t you defend yourself?”

“Well, if you had attacked me logically, yes, sure I can defend myself — but you were just applying labels.”

Shea continued to attempt to convince Kaczynski this was not the obvious case. Skrbina disagrees with the accusation that Ted had no logical basis for his beliefs.

“He [forms an argument] without interjecting opinions,” he says, countering Shea’s claim. “[Industrial Society and its Future contains] largely either a factual-based argument or at least an objective argument.

“He cites people as appropriate…given that he wrote it in his log cabin in Montana, he still does a reasonable job of citing people and ideas that would support what he’s saying. He’s aware of the arguments; he’s read serious authors; he’s aware of who these people are — he understands their arguments and he’s constructing his own argument in a rational way, and I guess that’s about all we can really ask in [his] situation.”

The term “gaslighting” became popular in the 1980s, referring to “a specific type of manipulation where the manipulator is trying to get someone else (or a group of people) to question their own reality, memory or perceptions.” And by December 2020, thanks to people like Jack, I was more than familiar with it.

Like Ted did Murray, I met Khun around the time I began this project — at the beginning of college. He was everything beguiling in a man: charismatic, egotistical, remarkably intelligent, and — alongside his instances of surprising kindness — prone to cruelty.

But I will note, before I say all this, he has changed. The better parts of him, the ones that first attracted me to his friendship, shine more brightly today. I hear he is a better person, and because I have never been able to hate him I hope he is happier than when we met.

When I encountered a medication-related complication causing sudden drops in weight, physical weakness, and pain, I wanted to keep it to myself — to avoid being the “sick person” amidst a pandemic that advertised myself as a medical liability to my friends.

But Khun was acutely aware something was wrong, and he threatened to expose that. One night on a walk home, my back hurt so badly and I became so lightheaded I had to sit down.

The roads were slick with rain that seeped into my shoes. It was dark and menacing weather.

“Hey all, can I sit down?” I asked weakly. “I don’t feel great.”

The rest of our friends, a couple steps ahead, agreed and waited on me. Khun, while doing the same, made a conspicuous deal out of the matter.

“Why do you have to sit down?” he asked.

“I just, I…” I rubbed my back, winced. “I just need to. I don’t feel good.”

He lurched forward several steps. “And why don’t you feel good, EJ?”

I gave him a pleading look, one that begged him to be gentle with me. He was not.

“I mean, are you sick or something?”

Everyone around us had become deeply uncomfortable, aware I was even more so. One of my friends turned away, pretending to be enthralled by her cigarette.

“I don’t know.”

Khun cocked his head. “You don’t know?”

You’d understand the level of degradation this constituted if you were there, if you were in as much evident pain as I was and being asked to defend your recognition of it without betraying yourself as weak.

Later I’d confront him for his behavior, telling him I didn’t appreciate his tone and deliberate effort to humiliate me. And he shrugged.

“I wasn’t trying to,” he said, “I was just giving you a chance to defend yourself.”

Maybe in his mind, he really was — Khun was a lot of things; a liar was never one of them — but it didn’t come across that way.

“Well, I couldn’t. I didn’t feel good.”

He said something along the lines of “That’s on you.” His face was perfectly expressionless.

Like Murray, Khun was smart and convincing. Like Ted, I was a child — nearly a full year younger than Khun — being persuaded I was not being viciously berated.

Gaslighting takes away a person’s autonomy by training them to distrust their own perception — by forcing their reliance of accounts into question, teaching them they are wrong and their abuser is the one who has a stable grip on reality. As Khun did to me, so Shea subtly but aggressively gaslit Kaczynski to make him feel weak in the face of his degradation.

“Although you did a great deal of breast-beating, a la Tarzan, about strength and individuality,” Shea says, “I’ve sensed an overriding sense of a, I don’t know really whether I’d call it weakness or fear… It just sort of permeates your entire philosophy, and I can understand it sitting here talking with you, but you don’t seem to me to have the courage of your convictions.”

“Well,” Ted replies at one point, “you, you say that my business about the fact that sense data can’t be proven is all wet. Well, can you prove that sense data are true?”

He stutters through his next few phrases until Shea tears again into him.

“And if a person is as egocentric, conceited… although I hate to use words and emotional terms in a discussion, as you are, it would seem to me that you prize intellectual honesty — although I didn’t see very much of it in your philosophy.”

At another point, he said “You’re not even discussing your philosophy —” which Ted was not, as he was defending himself from Shea’s manipulative rhetoric — “You’re not giving reasons, you’re not even. I mean, this isn’t even a discussion.”

“Well,” said Ted, frustrated, “I’m inclined to agree with you.”

I was 18. Ted was a 16-year-old child then, and so his parents signed the consent form allowing his participation. Wanda did so with only the best intentions.

This wasn’t her first time considering Ted’s participation in a study.

In his evaluation by Dr. Johnson, it is revealed “he was viewed as a bright child and was described by his mother as not being particularly comfortable around other children[,] displaying fears of people and buildings.”

Clearly Ted’s antisocial traits stemmed from a very young age — not originating at the standard young adulthood typical of schizophrenia. In fact, onset of these symptoms earlier than the age of 13 is considered “extremely rare” according to the Mayo Clinic.

A more likely explanation for early indicators of social dysfunction, though, did cross Wanda’s mind. Johnson’s report says “her concern… apparently led her to consider enrolling [Ted] in a study being conducted by Betelheim regarding autistic children.”

Kaczynski’s potential schizophrenic symptoms included a state of catatonia and/or “grossly disorganized… behavior,” social dysfunction, and alleged “delusions:” his worldview as it related to technological advances.

However, the DSM-5 states the second of these doesn’t count toward a diagnosis of schizophrenia should it be attributed to a case of autism.

Chapter IV: The Case for Autism

Shortly after my friendship with Khun ended, and I’d first expressed my thoughts on Ted to Ryan, I fell into another manic spell.

I spent tireless hours compiling articles, reports, and quotations both in favor of and against the possibility of schizophrenia. My nights became regularly sleepless. And I spent days searching for a way to reach David Kaczynski.

I’d first emailed him in December 2020, when he sent me a PDF file of “The Walking Wounded” that I cite in this work. For a year after that, we had no contact — until, with a first draft completed in January of 2022, I asked for an interview.

At this point, I was a sophomore in college. I had spent the better portion of the past year researching, to the fullest extent possible, Ted’s life and psychology. I’d made an effort to contact Dr. Johnson, but citing confidentiality ethics she declined an interview.

David, though, agreed to answer my questions over email.

“The questions you pose call for complex responses,” he said. “As an aside, I’ll say that I think labels tend to be limiting and often miss the complexity that we humans manifest. It’s been said that ‘the law loves bright lines’ and so devotes itself to either/or polarities. Fortunately, I guess, our human experience is much richer; but unfortunately, our criminal ‘justice system’ tends to dehumanize those it judges.”

He was a kind man, one who signed this email with a smiling face and agreed to reply within two to three weeks.

“I agree that the media portrait of Ted tends to be reductionistic,” he added. “Human beings are too complex, too ‘human,’ as it were, to fit within any one label or paradigm. I’ve often said it took a perfect storm of circumstances to produce the violent person that my brother became. He certainly wasn’t a sociopath since he demonstrated empathy on numerous occasions throughout his life.

“Shutting off empathy when triggered by fear or propaganda seems to be a human characteristic, or we wouldn’t have wars or genocides. I would also mention our family history of mental illness judging from what little I know of my maternal grandmother, the traumas you mention, the intellectual culture at Harvard which celebrated rationalism at the expense of intuition (in our brotherly communications, Ted argued that since ethics cannot be derived logically or verified empirically then they must have a purely subjective basis), and his many years of living in isolation — caught in a vise between his need to protect himself emotionally and his hunger for human connection. A few people have also mentioned to me that Ted might also fit somewhere along the autism spectrum.”

He then referred me to a neighbor of Ted’s, who he believed may be of help as she was exploring the “very same questions.”

“Anyway, don’t hesitate to send your questions along when ready,” he concluded. “I think your efforts to humanize Ted could be very helpful, and of course would be meaningful to our family.

“Best wishes, David.”

I was starstruck. I remember receiving the email in the comfort of my apartment, where Dorian lay by the fireplace licking one of his paws. Not only was David the most prominent interview subject I’d ever landed — he was incredibly kind, well-spoken too, and a key figure in my mission to portray Ted at his most multidimensional.

I jumped, gleeful and frantic, around the apartment and squealed.

It’s shocking; when one looks at the symptoms of schizophrenia detailed by Johnson and the memories shared by David, they all seem to cite behavior characteristic of PTSD, autism, or both.

Ted’s having “virtually no social life,” “frustrated anger,” “fantasies of revenge,” “inability to figure out whether he was attractive to women,” “difficulty with… noise from… other rooms,” and “not fitting into organized society” are all unsurprising symptoms of various neurodivergences.

These relating to social ineptitude and sensory sensitivity are common hallmarks of autism: the DSM-5 lists the first symptom of autism being “persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts, as manifested by… reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect… deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships, ranging, for example, from difficulties adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts; to difficulties in sharing imaginative play or in making friends; to absence of interest in peers.”

In David’s answers, a whole new portrait of Ted is painted: one from the eyes of his very brother, the man who knew him best.

“Mom’s efforts to understand Ted often reverted to the long-lasting impact of his ‘hospital experience’ at the age of nine months. Whether it was Mom’s narrative or my own deduction I can’t say, but I often considered the same possibility in trying to understand my brother’s lack of trust, his sense of social alienation, and especially his late-blooming and to me incomprehensive anger at our parents... I haven’t looked into the Murray experiment closely.

“I have read Alston Chase’s book [‘A Mind for Murder’], and felt appalled by the whole premise of this dehumanizing experiment. If it indeed was part of the CIA’s MKUltra stuff, we have greater reasons to be appalled, especially given that ‘subjects’ may have been selected based on their vulnerability... Ted periodically surprised me throughout our relationship.”

For some context, there is speculation Murray’s study was involved in the larger project known as MKUltra: “an illegal human experimentation program” led by CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb. Forms of torture, ranging from electroshock therapy to forced administration of LSD, comprised the effort to develop a mind control drug amidst the early Cold War — to learn how to break the human brain.

There is no concrete evidence Murray’s study was specifically devoted to the MKUltra project, but Murray himself was fascinated by the topic of mind control. Additionally, both MKUltra and the Harvard study remain suspiciously clandestine: in 2000, Kaczynski’s file from the study — in which he was code-named “Lawful” — was permanently sealed by the Murray Center. And, further damningly, many records from MKUltra have been destroyed.

So, too, was Ted by whatever he underwent, whether or not it was by the hand of the government.

“One surprise I remember was the summer after he returned from Harvard when I approached with enthusiasm, eager to share some new ‘insights’ I had culled from reading some works in literature and philosophy,” continued David. “I expected him to be interested, responsive, supportive, since he always had been so with me. Instead, I found him derisive and dismissive when I broached my new-found ideas for discussion.

“Only years later, after I learned about the Murray experiments, did I connect his negative attitude with the possibility that he might’ve been passing down to me what the Murray experimenters had done to him…

“We think we know others better than we really do, certainly when we fail to recognize how much we might be projecting. Also, [it’s] hard to separate Ted’s training as a math researcher and dyed-in-the-wool rationalist from any more innate autistic tendencies.”

Savant syndrome is “a rare condition in which persons with various developmental disorders, including autistic disorder, have an amazing ability and talent” in a specific area. In Ted’s case, he excelled in mathematics beyond anybody else’s comprehension to a degree that resembles a savant — so much so, his dissertation won the Summer B. Myers prize for thesis of the year.

“Ted was quietly solving open problems,” said his classmate Joel H. Shapiro to the LA Times, “and creating new mathematics. It was as if he could write poetry while the rest of us were struggling to learn grammar.”

His mathematical abilities and capacity for logical thinking surpassed everybody around him, and they became his identity. In some ways, the bright light he shone isolated him — both him and David.

“They never went out…” said one neighbor of the Kaczynski boys. “They had this book knowledge. They played chess [rather than outside with the other kids].”

Mathematics enveloped Ted’s entire personality. He was “always at the library,” said classmate John Remers, and didn’t talk much outside of his field of study. Even his demeanor was neutral, strategic, and focused on what could be proven with logic.

Ted Kaczynski never got to be a kid. He was a mathematician, first and foremost, and he was ruthlessly ostracized for it.

Despite being described by classmate Bill Widlacki as a “nice kid, polite, courteous, [and] easygoing,” he was “out of place. Like with girls, I never saw him dating anybody.”

Kaczynski did, in his interview with Johnson, acknowledge a desire for some romantic or sexual connection. His social endeavors only went so far as David, though — due to his fear of other people as well as his difficulty making older friends in his grade.

In high school where the Chicago Tribune describes him as an “egghead” and a “loner,” he perceived “a gradual increasing amount of hostility I had to face from the other kids. By the time I left high school, I was definitely regarded as a freak by a large segment of the student body.”

The Tribune says he primarily mingled with a “loose-knit clique of overachievers” who “rarely socialized outside of an academic setting.” His behavior wasn’t too unusual for his friend group, if a little more ostracized: former classmate Russell Mosny admits “Ted as an individual, though he interacted with us fairly comfortably, was still not socially involved with any one of us.”

But I imagine if one of these nerdy, so-called “briefcase boys” had seen Ted as more than another excellent brain. I invite you to think about why loners remain so: nobody else, usually, acts on any sort of propensity to engage with them in a friendly context.

Chapter V: A Conversation with David Kaczynski

It becomes clear, reading David’s response, Ted was much hungrier for connection than he let on to anybody in his life.

“There was the time he recounted in a letter when a grungy, homeless person got on a bus he was riding,” said David. “Seeing how all the other passengers tried to discourage the homeless guy from sitting close to them, Ted — the great loner — invited the poor man to sit next to him and then engaged him in conversation.

“There are numerous instances in which Ted displayed unusual kindness and generosity to other people’s small children, including giving them hand-made gifts and toys that took him hours to construct. There was his befriending of the Lincoln[, Montana] librarian’s son who was having a tough time socially. The common thread here is that Ted saw all these people as non-threatening. He could identify with them on some level. They were ‘us’ not ‘them.’”

Perhaps it’s not that Ted didn’t want friends, as David believed in his childhood. Maybe the “odd man out” wanted in — to reveal himself as the brilliant boy who never failed to show kindness to his brother — who, unlike his peers, wouldn’t dare look down on him as an outcast for his age. Ted sought friendships among the vulnerable and exiled people with whom he identified, among those he was faithful would not reject him.

“I remember two behaviors, though,” said David, “that were rather striking. Almost whenever an extended family member or familiar family friend would drop by for a visit, especially when the visit was unannounced, Ted would drop everything and literally run up to his room on the second floor of our home, quite as if he felt panicked at the thought of seeing or being seen by someone outside the immediate family. Of course, this could have been a residue of trauma, as well...

“Once, for sure, and maybe twice, when I accompanied Ted on his quest for a Canadian homestead in 1969, he fell into a state that seemed close to, if not actually catatonic. The time I remember most clearly was one morning when I woke up and joined Ted, who had arisen earlier, at the campfire and found him completely unresponsive. I couldn’t even get a ‘don’t bother me’ from him.

“Feeling at a loss as to what to do, I went for a long walk. When I returned, Ted seemed to be himself again. When I asked why he wouldn’t answer me earlier, he just said, ‘I was thinking.’

“I shrugged it off, but the memory stuck because I’d never seen Ted or any one else in a state of mind so utterly remote and unreachable.”

These flat-affected, detached spells became more frequent as Ted went off to college, where he would often after classes — as he did in his childhood, upon guests visiting — go straight to his dorm without a word and very nearly slam the door.

David told the Washington Post in 1996 “that all his life [Ted] has felt a great deal of stress in the company of others except people he has known well over a long period of time. And as you know, there were only very, very few people he knew well over a long period of time.”

This xenophobia, less so than psychotic tendencies, demonstrates serious issues with trust and strangers — a natural response for someone used to being ostracized by them. It is easy to misconstrue everything Ted did as being characteristic of schizophrenia once the suspicion has crept into someone’s mind, but every single one of his symptoms can be attributed to probable non-psychotic conditions.

One is the simple glaring feeling of rejection he experienced in the world around him. In his journals, and all his life, he expressed that “I would not fit into the present society in any case. What makes a situation intolerable is the fact that in all probability, the values that I detest, will soon be achieved through science, an utterly complete and permanent victory throughout the whole world, with a total extrication of everything I value. Through super human computers and mind control there simply will be no place for a rebellious person to hide and my kind of people will vanish forever from the earth. It’s not merely the fact that I cannot fit into society that has induced me to rebel, as violently as I have, it is the fact that I can see society made possible by science inexorably imposing on me.”

These thoughts he never voiced, for the report indicates he was “concerned people would perceive him to be a ‘sickie’” for the way “organized society frustrates [his] very powerful urge for physical freedom and personal autonomy.”

Even at his most unstable — at his most isolated — Kaczynski feared being alienated for his aggressive ideations. It is glaringly clear that after a lifetime of ostracization, he ceased making attempts to socialize understanding they were usually rejected; he resorted to the idea that if he could not be loved, he would be feared.

And he certainly was, but what Ted didn’t understand was that he was never alone.

“I think I recounted in my memoir [Every Last Tie] about the time my mother approached me after she had read Louise Wilson’s This Stranger, My Son — a mother’s perspective on having a son diagnosed with schizophrenia. My mother Wanda recognized some commonalities, which did worry her, even if she was unwilling to entertain the possibility that her son was diagnosably mentally ill.”

But more than schizophrenia she did suspect autism — another powerful potential explanation of his asocial nature — and not once but twice she sought to investigate the possibility of its presence in her elder son.

“Mom often recounted how whenever she brought Ted to play with other young children, he always tended to play alongside rather than with the other kids,” David continued. “She even briefly volunteered at a clinic in Chicago for the treatment of autistic children with the thought of perhaps bringing her son there, only to find herself repelled by the strictly ‘behavioristic’ approach being employed, which she thought dehumanizing.”

The behavioristic approach focuses on observing external behavior to understand psychological phenomena; it condemns the study of “unobservable” events occurring in the mind. Notable figures who pioneered its movement include Ivan Pavlov and B. F. Skinner, both of whom dabbled in conditioning. It is no coincidence that behaviorism hones its focus on altering behavior through systems of rewarding and repercussive reinforcement.

More than Wanda wanted answers, she detested the thought of her son being trained like one of Pavlov’s dogs to behave in a specific manner.

“So she quit and let go of any thought of bringing little Teddy there for treatment.”

It’s possible Ted had no organic dysfunction, but extreme introversion that only would have needed coaxing to come out. Or he was on the spectrum. Either way, his asocial behavior was displayed too early to be attributed to schizophrenia — more likely than Johnson’s explanation is the possibility it was rooted in his terrifying “hospital experience.”

That leaves two symptoms to be accounted for: his catatonic depression, and his idiosyncratic worldview.

Alston Chase in “A Mind for Murder” says Kaczynski “is not the extreme loner he has been made out to be, and this rings true. While Kaczynski may have been somewhat forcibly isolated, he felt comfortable expressing his ideology to David — even inviting David to join him. But the same woman whose keen reader’s eye would cause David to turn in his own brother was, in previous instances, the force that drove Ted and David apart for good.”

Chapter VI: The Depression Room

David recounted “I certainly didn’t recognize any symptoms of mental illness in my brother when I was growing up. Then again, we tend to normalize the behavior of people closest to us.”

I know I’d never have the strength to do what he did, let alone to do it twice. When I learned of my brothers’ less acceptable behaviors, I made excuses for them — past an ethical extent, sometimes.

Ted was fired from a foam-cutting company, by David himself, in 1973 for “inappropriate behavior towards a female managerial where he wrote several demeaning limericks about this woman with whom he’d been on a few dates and by whom he was rejected.”

Naturally, his behavior was unacceptable, and surely he knew it well. But as it was for me in the case of my brothers, rejection was a powerfully damaging force for Ted — not only this, but betrayal. There exist several indicators of his low self-esteem, including countless instances of “humiliation” described in his psychiatric evaluation. He was found, upon his arrest, living in filthy and unkempt condition — not a far cry from my atrocity of a teenage “depression room.” And indeed, he was depressed. He gradually made less and less contact with his family.

Says David in “Every Last Tie,” “His confidence in his intellect was not matched by any visceral confidence in his worth as a person, and over time the divide would only grow larger… His separation from loved ones, combined with his social awkwardness, fed the fear that he was unlovable.”

And by college, Ted had stopped trying to socialize with his peers. He was aware of his reputation as a lonesome nerd, and David told the Washington Post “He said that all his life he has felt a great deal of stress in the company of others except people he has known well over a long period of time.”

Again, this discomfort around strangers — combined with his rocking behavior, in a chair he had in college — indicates a position on the spectrum. Combined with depression in the 20^th century, especially given the way we handle men’s mental health, this was a recipe for a difficult social life and negative self-perception.

“Ted holed up in his sleeping room and rocked endlessly, banging his chair against a wall,” according to the LA Times. “Late at night, he played his trombone. His suitemates sensed anger…

“‘His room was an unholy mess,’ said [one named] MacIntosh. ‘Sometimes it smelled like he had left his lunch in there for weeks.’”

Not long after I learned this, I recognized one of my dearest friends wasn’t doing too well. I was concerned by his lethargic, isolative behavior — he rarely left his room — and felt my anxiety grow surrounding his state each day.

On a whim, I visited the ornate stone halls of Memorial Student Union and waited in the long line at Starbucks. This building is always packed with students, each as impatient as I was. I tapped my sneaker-clad foot against the tile and, with my four shots of espresso, bought a spinach and feta wrap to bring to his dorm.

He swore he was never going to eat it, but thanked me anyway — still, he insisted I take it back.

“I got it for you,” I argued. “Just keep it, okay? You might want it later.”

At the end of his school year, he opened his mini-fridge to a putrid stench. It really smelled like something had died in there. Inside, the culprit sat: a two-month-old spinach and feta wrap, untouched by a college kid too deep in depression to eat.

I never forgot the feta wrap incident. While we joke about it now, my friend’s poor organizational skills and lack of self-care were the most glaring signs he was in a darker place than I could have ever imagined.

But he gave in, and he thanked me. “Thank you, EJ.” And he smiled.

And I went back to my dorm, oblivious, Ted Kaczynski on my mind — and I live with that guilt, with the knowledge I failed to recognize something was severely wrong, for the rest of my life. I wonder if Ted’s suitemates ever think the same thing.

Holed up in my dorm (I was also seriously ill), I learned from an article Ted was reprimanded for his own aesthetic dysfunctions — as in the case of Wanda yelling at both of her sons for leaving dirty socks around the house, for which he “demeaned her… not understanding it was normal for adolescents to have sloppy rooms” twenty years later. Ted was aware of his disorganized behavior, and being called out for it hit a soft spot. That’s because his anger was never about the bedroom, and perhaps not directed toward Wanda at all.

As much painstaking effort as he put into building a life in the wild, he never cared about the cleanliness of where he lived. In the woods, he allegedly reeked of dirt and sweat — he eventually went so far as to give up personal hygiene entirely.

However, I invite you into my college depression room.

Imagine there is no purpose in waking up in the morning. As far as you can believe, nobody loves you: you were born alone and you will die alone; sometimes, it feels this will occur very soon. Nobody, yourself included, loves you. Every day is the longest of your life, and somehow there’s not enough energy in any of them to pick the socks off the ground.

Just do it, you keep berating yourself, but the momentum doesn’t come. There’s no urge to clean, no sense of pride once it’s done — and the socks, which you wear every day, never stop coming.

Life in these moments is an endless sadistic cycle of picking up and washing socks, only for them to end back up on the floor. And when they do, you’ll have to spend two more hours of your ever-wasting life just working up the energy to pick them up again.

Pick up the damn socks. It’ll only take a minute.

But every minute is so long and you cannot throw out the feta wrap; as angry as you make yourself, you can’t pick up the socks and you feel worse for it. You are spiraling, and you are ashamed of it in the throes of your spell of self-loathing burnout. You haven’t even done anything to be burnt-out. You are at the mercy of the most inexplicable, inescapable fatigue a person can know.

If the depression room is breathing, you are at its wretched ugly center as the begrudgingly-beating heart that keeps all its foulness alive. You are the organ that pins the socks to the floor, where they mock you further down the spiral with no end in sight.

I used to lash out at my mother when I was chastised for picking up the socks — not because I was delusional or schizophrenic, but because when you’re depressed you already hate yourself for the filth you feel coating you like a film of sweat. And you loathe every reminder of it. All your self-directed anger comes out at whoever tries to intervene, and because you have so much grief and you are so full of rage, you will say everything cruel that distracts you from the seething you’ve been stuck in, alone, for days or entire weeks.

It’s not uncommon for depression to make someone appear unhinged. Ted’s catatonic, low-energy and high-sensitivity spells mirror the symptoms of depression to a startling degree.

In the ways that mattered to him, though, he remained functional.

Throughout it all he excelled academically, enough to get a PhD: possible, but not at all common, in the case of schizophrenia, given the onset of symptoms occurs during one’s college years and this hinders their academic potential. It is rare for them to crop up before one’s twenties — it is not for symptoms of depression, or autism.

Even in the days he didn’t shower or brush his teeth, he fetched water and built fires and hunted. Kaczynski was never incompetent — he was seriously depressed, and sometime in young adulthood came the tipping point that plunged him even more consistently into darkness.

Chapter VII: Gender Dysphoria is a Hell of a Drug

At the start of his fifth year at Michigan, “[Kaczynski] had been experiencing several weeks of intense and persistent sexual excitement involving fantasies of being a female. During that time period,” says Johnson’s report, “he became convinced that he should undergo sex change surgery.”

The report goes on to detail his setting up an appointment at the University of Michigan; however, “while in the waiting room, he became anxious and humiliated over the prospect of talking about this to the doctor. When he was actually seen, he did not discuss these concerns, but rather claimed he was feeling some depression and anxiety over the possibility… of being drafted into the military.”

He left the office in shame and rage, and he describes this as the first time he felt he could kill someone. His shame, and a lack of healthy avenues through which to cope with it, led him down the path of homicidal ideation in a hypermasculine exhibition of aggression.

“Ted always struck me as being rather macho, with little of the stereotypical feminine apparent in his lifestyle or demeanor, interests or personal values,” said David. “Hard for me to believe that a pure consideration of purely imagined pleasure could lead him to the point of seriously pursuing gender transition surgery.”

Women and femininity were recurring issues for Ted, who “made several contacts with mental health systems around the issue of establishing relationships with women” in early 1988. He cited “a dream about a young woman” being the reason for his effort to seek help — being lucid and aware of his need for psychological attention.

In his psychiatric report, Ted also claimed his fantasies of transitioning into a woman were purely sexual in nature. And this cannot be deemed impossible, but the depression to which being male drove him renders it a highly unlikely explanation.

Gender dysphoria — “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity” in the words of the American Psychiatric Association — is a deeply upsetting sensation, one that drives transgender and non-binary youth to measures as extreme as self-mutilation. I have seen firsthand what it has done to my non-cisgender friends and peers, the way it darkens their minds and makes them doubt the validity of their identities.

“It’s hard to say I’m trans, to myself,” a friend (whom we’ll call Leroy) told me as I was in the writing process. “I feel like I’m pretending even though I’m not.”

They add “A lot of [my dysphoria] was established when traumatic things started happening to me.” As a survivor of gender-based violence, Leroy said “gender dysphoria piled on top of it and started impacting me [more heavily]... [it gradually became] more traumatic than it was [before I hit puberty].”

Gender dysphoria is a hell of a drug — one that is distressing enough to trigger the kind of depressive behavior seen in Kaczynski.

“I think I consider it traumatic because it’s, like, a war being waged in my brain, and the traumatic aspect comes in when you — well, with impostor syndrome, and things like that, in which you don’t feel like you are presenting the way you are, and you are afraid that you’re not actually trans,” says another friend called Max, “and it’s just — it’s really hard to go through, and it really impacts your mental health, especially [if] you have other traumatic things going on.”

According to both my therapist and two transgender friends, it’s common to experience dysphoria without recognizing it — simply due to the fact people lack the education surrounding genderfluidity to understand their own identities. It can still be traumatic.

Waking up every day with the sense your body is not yours — that you are, somehow, not your most authentic self, owed to your physical features — is not unlike the sensations common in rape survivors. It is very reminiscent of the way I felt after my own assault, and Leroy is right in recognizing dysphoria comorbid with other distressing memories is even more potent.

A certain threshold approaches in which one’s discomfort with their body expands past general unhappiness into the territory of chronic self-loathing — almost like round-the-clock dissociation, says Max, a terrifying detachment from one’s own body and sense of self — which is traumatizing to bear on a daily basis.

“From his diaries, it would appear that his one visit to a therapist with that aim [of transitioning] in mind was a real turning point, as he left the consultation with a sort of epiphany — that by killing a psychologist or scientist [he] might ease his own suffering.” David also, it is worth noting, suggested gender dysphoria is a common symptom of early schizophrenia onset — this he learned from one of his brother’s defense psychiatrists, Dr. Xavier Amador. However, gender dysphoria is not considered a symptom, or at least listed as one, in the DSM-5.

Chapter VIII: The Case Against Delusion

Clear evidence presents itself to show Kaczynski was not delusional.

Johnson’s evaluation makes note of this.

“Mr. Kaczynski… showed adequate hygiene [at the time of evaluation],” she says. “He was oriented to person, date, time, place, and situation. He understood the type and purpose of the evaluation and expressed his intent to cooperate.”

Previously, she notes, it was specifically his aversion to undergoing assessment by Dr. David Foster in 1997 that led Foster to “opine” Kaczynski suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. However, both Dr. Raquel Gue and Dr. Karen Froming had shared impressions Kaczynski suffered paranoid schizophrenia. At a certain point, hearing the same thing over and over again becomes exhausting — and growing tired of it is not, as Dr. Xavier Amador speculated it was, a symptom of any sort of schizophrenia.

Were that the case, I’d have a paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis for not wanting to attend the Zoom partial hospitalization program in which my parents forcibly enrolled me — where I was reminded, every single day, I had PTSD. Refusing evaluation — especially when one has sought treatment to the extent Kaczynski did — is not a symptom.

He was clear-headed, and he knew something was wrong. Johnson also, conveniently, made note of this: “In 1991 Mr. Kaczynski contacted a local general practitioner, Dr Glen Wielenga, in Lincoln, concerning insomnia. Mr. Kaczynski indicates the doctor suspected he was depressed.”

This follows a then-three-year saga of him making contact with “several mental health systems” to discuss his sleep disturbances, depressive tendencies, and interpersonal (specifically romantic) dysfunctions. His first therapist, who helped him find employment, he could not afford.

“Subsequent to that session,” writes Johnson, “he wrote to the Mental Health Center in Helena, requesting that he be assigned a counselor with whom he could correspond by mail. Mr. Kaczynski indicates that this could not be worked out and he remained depressed for the next several months… to some degree until 1994.”

His depression rendered him unable to follow through in trying to find a therapist — incapable of caring for himself, of picking up the damn socks. He was also unable to afford another doctor based in Missouri.

A positive relationship with a Dr. Caroline Goren in Missoula, Montana — whom he consulted regarding cardiovascular effects of his stress — led him to consider “a more conventional career,” but Kaczynski received no psychiatric help and consequently did not progress mentally. This depression continued to plunge him into dysfunctional, dark episodes characterized by raging lashing-outs to Wanda and David.

Any source, from WebMD to the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, will tell you most schizophrenic people will deny having any illness — but he sought help, and he did so doggedly. Despite not having the economic privilege to do so in childhood or to maintain consistent treatment as a grown man, he knew he needed help — and that necessary assistance wasn’t a diagnosis that no longer is honored in the DSM-5.

Subtypes of schizophrenia were removed in 2013 because, among other reasons: “they weren’t very reliable descriptions,” “there was no difference in brain functioning between the subtypes,” and “the subtypes didn’t help predict how the condition would play out over time.” Essentially, they were a product of some hackneyed pseudoscience whose consequences labeled a brilliant, schizophrenia-free man “paranoid” because his ideology threatened a system founded on conformity.

To qualify as schizophrenic, one must exhibit two of the following three symptoms: “delusions[,] hallucinations[, and] disorganized speech.” But Johnson describes Kaczynski as present, reporting no hallucinations. He “understood the type and purpose of the evaluation and expressed his intent to cooperate. Throughout the evaluation he answered questions to the best of his ability, was able to discuss information, and relate a narrative without prompting.”

He was a perfectly present, perceptive subject with excellent speaking abilities. He neither saw nor heard anything that wasn’t there; he was rooted in reality — and eliminating two key symptoms, one can already rule out the possibility of schizophrenia.

Chapter IX: Other Kaczynskis

This diagnosis hinged on the claim Kaczynski, and the thesis of “Industrial Society and its Future,” is delusional. But I invite you to think of Copernicus, of Huxley, of Jesus Christ.

These men changed the world — and the way we see it today — through what were, for their times, frightening and outlandish ideas. Depending where you stand, Jesus may have actually been clinically insane — or a liar. Why, then, are none of these people labeled crazy? Why am I not being diagnosed with schizophrenia for staking the claim Kaczynski should never have been?

It’s because we are palatable to you, and we have never killed anyone. Huxley didn’t present his morbid vision for the future of genetic engineering with a bombing campaign; Jesus created a major world religion that (for its large percentage of ethnically, educationally, economically privileged membership) has held power in countless form in thousands of cases. And Copernicus was right, we know today — but what will the future say, looking back on the way we discredited a man who through violent means conveyed a message that rings even more true today?

David himself agreed “I also wish more people would look more closely at his ideas about technology. Not forget his reprehensible, negative actions, certainly, but hold those actions aside just long enough to consider his arguments seriously.

“Our mindless adherence to technological development could be leading us beyond a point of no-return, both for the health and well-being of the earth and for our ability to make wise and considered choices. Too much is at stake not to listen to the sober thinker embedded in the deeply-flawed man.”

Prof. David Skrbina would go so far as to deem Kaczynski completely sane.

“People would say that ‘Well, look, just by definition that he sent fatal mail bombs… that indicates some kind of extreme mental condition if not a mental illness or a pathology.’”

He stirred in his seat, searching for his next words.

“I guess you could argue…anyone willing to do that is suffering some kind of mental condition, and I guess that could be the case — but in this case, that’s all sort of separate and apart from the basic argument that he presents in his writings…His stated reason, of course, was to get the notoriety to publish the manifesto in a high-visibility venue that would have an impact, so in that sense it was a strategic decision to conduct that bombing campaign. I mean, it’s not different from how military leaders conduct warfare…for strategic reasons to achieve, you know, sociopolitical goals. So he’s doing it as an individual, but I guess I don’t know if that makes it better or worse. It’s still a crime, obviously, but there’s a rationale behind it — it’s not based on just hatred or emotion.”

He continues “[His mental clarity] seems to be undiminished even to this day, and I guess he’s — what, 79, approaching 80 here in the next couple months, and even the latest letters seem to be fully rational and lucid. So it’s not like… he’s losing any ability, doesn’t seem to be losing memory; um, I’ve not heard directly from him [recently] but it seems like even pushing 80 he basically has his full mental capacity.”

These aren’t the ramblings of some raving lunatic. Kaczynski, for all his genius, was right — if what he did was wrong.

Some even knew it at the time of “Industrial Society and its Future”’s publication, but the vast majority remains in the dark — because of a blatantly incorrect diagnosis that labeled one of our brightest, if less conventionally moral, philosophers insane.

Let us look at the Kaczynskis of modern literature: my all-time favorite character, Holden Caulfield, is like him, isolated and deeply protective of his younger siblings. Popular opinion reduces him to an abrasive, bratty loner with some sort of mental disturbance — but unlike Ted, who was deemed insane, Holden had no bold ideology upon which to hinge his behavioral course. He had only his impulse, and he had a lot of it.

Halfway into my sophomore year of college, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. This made a lot of sense, more than I cared to admit at the time. And gradually, I started to realize why I empathize so much with Holden.

I once planned a trip to New Orleans, which I intended to take in secret on my own. Unfortunately, I was hit by a two-week-long depressive spell that prevented me from mimicking Holden’s leaving school: my moods were characterized by Manichaean swings, which remained outside of my control as well as that of external factors. No matter how bad life got, I could still snap into a spell of extreme ego and high energy. And when things were good, I often was gloomy and isolative.

My erratic behavior meant Holden’s leaving school resonated a great deal with me.

Scholars have debated the nature of Holden’s mental illness since “The Catcher in the Rye” was first published, and he is clearly traumatized. However, he also appears to have symptoms of bipolar disorder: there is no final consensus from what else he suffers, but like with Ted I heavily related to his intense depression and ever-swinging, ever-self-destructive mood.

“The Catcher in the Rye” is an excellent depiction of PTSD in young people. Says Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya from the University Putra Malaysia, “‘The Catcher’ is a reflection of Salinger‘s personal experience of war and trauma, and Holden is modeled based on his youth and the novel can be read as his biography. In a 1954 interview, Salinger noted ― ‘My boyhood was very much the same as that of the boy in the book’ (Salinger , 1999, p.177–8).”

“The surplus of flashbacks” that often paralyze Holden are the most telling symptom, alongside many others.

“Holden displays many common traits of a person with PTSD following this loss,” according to an essay from The Guest House. “He has substantial amounts of guilt and depression and struggles to remember the details of events in his life. Holden’s emotions seem to be highly unbalanced. His rage is extreme and his joy is more manic. He takes pleasure in lying, the expert in crafting the perfect lie, and sometimes he cannot distinguish between the truth and his fabrication.”

Even with his pathological lying, Holden has never been labeled schizophrenic. He is more prone to admitting his traumatic experiences than Ted, and as a result we don’t attribute his symptoms to an organic dysfunction. Because Holden has no outlandish ideologies or philosophies about the world, he is seen in the public eye as sane if deeply troubled. One of the most hated characters in literature is shown a fairer judgment than Ted, because Holden is both nonviolent and more honest with his reader than Ted is in discussing his own distressing experiences.

I mentioned Huxley earlier, and on the note of trauma in literature it is also of utmost importance we analyze the psyche of another figure whose behavior mimics Ted’s: John the Savage of “Brave New World.” Born into a Savage Reservation, the only character with a biological mother, John is thrust into a society dominated by genetic engineering and a strictly-upheld caste system (which shouldn’t sound unfamiliar).

John finds solace in literature, speaking eloquently in the words and ideas of some of history’s greatest writers. He is the most human character in the book for his complexity, his dissatisfaction with the hyper-industrialized world, and the blatant disregard for humanity in favor of technological advance.

Like Ted, he aims to start a revolution. He calls for a revolution among the lower-caste population, who have been genetically engineered to fall short of the “Alphas” in mental capacity and physical stamina. He rejects the advances of Lenina Crowne, a prospective love interest who indulges in the society’s obsession with sex to an extent that makes him deeply uncomfortable. He refuses to immerse himself in the world of drugged-out conformity that threatens to destroy all that makes him human; in the end, he pays the ultimate price when he is publicly villainized and driven to suicide.

John the Savage is an animal in their eyes, because it has become degrading to be human. And in a world of perfect people, escaping the shared experience of pain and frustration with their hedonistic lifestyles, he is a monster.

Like Ted, John was demonized for ideas deemed a threat to society as it stood and was upheld. This, as it did Ted, was the mark of his downfall in a world that stood against all he valued.

But from our perspectives, John isn’t insane. Because we agree with him, nobody is calling him paranoid. We understand the value of human freedom to the greatest extent we can in our world — but herein lies the problem; we live in our world.

And from our perspective, Ted is as savage as they made John out to be. We perceive ourselves as having liberty, but the car analogy must again be considered: in our world, it is easy to overlook the ways in which technology is forced upon us, so that it directly threatens personal freedom. Ted, recognizing this, set out to instigate his own revolution.

It may not have been moral; it may not have been wide-scale, but it was not rooted in disorder. Each move, every single bomb, was placed and made with the utmost calculation by a man deeply wounded by a sense of unfathomable displacement in a world that tried to box him into a certain, unnatural way of life.

If you’ve read “Frankenstein,” this should not be too unfamiliar. The monster is man-made in that he becomes what he is perceived as: deeply damaged by the rejection of his creator, he embarks upon a murderous rampage to exact revenge on the world that has hurt him and denied him its greatest joys — love, connection, acceptance. In the end, it is no plain wonder why the monster is so intent on destroying Frankenstein: he has done the same to his own creation.

We perceive none of these literary figures, similar as they are to Ted, as insane or unhinged. But because Ted’s ideas threatened our own worldview, he was made out to be a madman exactly like John the Savage. And he responded, almost understandably, in the same manner as Frankenstein’s own monstrous creation, and he was punished for all this by the world that made him.

Chapter X: Rabbit Heart

As opposed to the two-dimensional lunatic portrayed in Ted’s trial, David’s depiction of him is extraordinarily complex — and above all, kind.

“One summer,” he recalls, “our father, Ted Sr., caught a baby rabbit in our backyard. He placed the little animal in a wooden cage covered with a screen top. Several neighborhood kids clustered around to gape at the rabbit, and our father seemed proud to show it off. Our family, after all, had a pronounced educational bent. Dad used to teach us how to identify plants. So it was only natural that he would take pleasure in exposing the neighborhood kids to an ‘educational’ experience — the chance to view a wild animal up close. My friends were jockeying to get a good look.

“Ted was the last kid to join the onlookers, evidently curious to see what all the fuss was about. But as soon as he glimpsed the little rabbit cowering in a corner of the cage, his reaction was instinctive: ‘Oh, oh, let it go!’ he said with panicked urgency.

“Dad, seeing Ted’s distress, quickly carried the cage to a wooden area across the street and released the rabbit into the wild.”

Until Harvard, Ted was a gentle and good-natured boy. But David calls his abuse in college “the beginning of the end” and says “he might have been ready for the academic challenges of a place like Harvard, but he was not ready developmentally or psychologically. In retrospect, our parents’ one serious mistake… was to send him away from home at such an early age.”

One neighbor, LeRoy Weinberg, would later wonder “Did [Turk and Wanda] push too hard?” as quoted by the LA Times. David, though, dismisses his parents as the cause of Ted’s troubles — from his perspective, they were never even anticipated.

“I never had any hint in my own direct experience of Ted hallucinating or being markedly delusional,” he told me. “The closest to the latter might have been a letter he sent me regarding a vivid dream he had, in which some of my good friends were secretly in league with a satanic figure bent on stealing me away from him and taking me to some hellish dark zone from which there could be no return.

“If this was just a dream or nightmare, I wondered, why did he take it so seriously? And why did he share the dream with me, as if to warn me against some grave danger? Certainly, the dream had some features that we might rightly call paranoid. Was it really just a dream, I’ve sometimes wondered... As I said, I’m not qualified to second-guess the experts, though as I mentioned previously, I think psychiatry and psychology are far from being ‘exact’ sciences... At that time, it was clear to me that the only think likely to save Ted’s life from the death penalty was an Axis I diagnosis [like paranoid schizophrenia]. As much as I knew such a diagnosis would disturb Ted, I felt his life was more valuable, even if it had to be saved by publicly deconstructing his personal self-image.”

And here, David brings up the possibility Johnson knew what she was doing when she made the wild assertion Ted was schizophrenic. It is wholly possible this diagnosis was made to save the life of the man who bears it.

“I don’t know what Johnson might have felt about the bigger picture. For me, legitimacy is hardly an issue if we hope to establish legitimacy by objective measures. Human beings are not objects,” he says. “Courts and jurists pose as impersonal and unbiased implementers of the law. I see that as basically humanly impossible, at least if we want to keep our humanity central to any plausible notion of justice. Nor is it fully credible based on history.”

Chapter XI: A Song for the Cerebral

[I once] got nauseous on a mountain-top during a long hike in the Canadian wilderness. He ran down the mountain then back up again with medicine he retrieved from our car, just to make me feel better… [What I loved most about my brother was] his capacity for empathy… I only wish he had not learned to shut it off. I also admire his courage in “walking the walk” i.e. having the integrity to live his ideas to the fullest. Again, I only wish he were more open to a broader range of ideas, esp. from the world’s wisdom and spiritual traditions.

—David Kaczynski,
via email

There are many themes coursing throughout this story: the strength and limitations of brotherhood, the extent to which promotion of a philosophy is ethical, morality within the contexts of medicine and science. What I see in it is the power of the human mind, and what its greatest potential can do to the world.

Ted Kaczynski is rumored to have stage four cancer, with a maximum of two years to live, but while he does he is one of the most intelligent men in modern history. His aptitude made him a target in many respects. He experienced dramatic social isolation as well as abuse at the hands of an institution profiting off the pain of its most vulnerable. This trauma, no matter with what disorder it was comorbid, broke him. Henry Murray’s thirst for knowledge knew no limits, and it sought to exploit Kaczynski’s potential to the fullest extent.

The closest thing we can touch to the soul is our minds. We are not only the hands we’re dealt, but an amalgamation of every person, memory, and ideology we encounter throughout the strange course of human life. Like any animal, we are the sum of our neurotransmitters’ commands: we live in the control of our minds, and some of us live to dominate and comprehend them better than others.

For all its triumphs, psychology is also a minefield. It only takes one adversity, one corrupted brain, one evil intention, to ruin a life.

I am fully at the mercy, and a manifestation, of my brain. Outside my abnormal psychology, I live with epilepsy. I am constantly working to keep my brain cells, and their erratic electrical flashes, under management. Doing the same with bipolar depression and anxiety is exhausting — trauma alone is a vicious opponent. And without the support I had at every turn, I can’t even begin to fathom how tired Kaczynski must have been.

The brain — human or otherwise — is the single most powerful catalyst of change on the planet. It can save or ruin innumerable lives, and it can do the same to a society.

Kaczynski’s was one of extraordinary talent and capacity, and it deserved better. Just as I would have benefited from help earlier on, perhaps the “peace of mind” he sought would have saved not only him, but those who symbolized everything against which he railed.

 

“The reality of life’s journey, with its many obstacles and tests, is not so easy to formulate. In some ways Ted never stopped being his mother’s son. Unfortunately, his capacity for empathy was eroded by his strong sense of personal injury and disappointment; his hope for the world was shattered by an apocalyptic vision. His sense of utter helplessness in the face of the overwhelming threat technology posed to wild nature and to human freedom upset his fragile equilibrium and drove him to resist through violent means. He felt compelled to speak his truth; his integrity depended on it. He posed questions — important questions about humanity’s future — that no one who has understood them can answer. Yet his questions go largely unheard because of (among other things) the deafening violence that accompanied them.”

—David Kaczynski,
“Every Last Tie”

Acknowledgments

A long period of hyperfixation went into the making of this work, and I’d first and foremost like to thank the people who dealt with my manic obsession with its subject.

The emotional support of Khun, Ryan, Max, Toula Boznos, Artemis Burkemper, June Carrisalez, Jana Casey, Dagny Haas, Donald Haas, Dorian Haas, Nessarose Haas, Michael and Renee Haas, Patrick Leonard, Logan Snell, Fox Stakelum, and Caroline Topham buoyed me through my least motivated days. For that I am immeasurably grateful, for without them this book would not exist.

I also owe thanks to those who supported me in the intellectual process of writing another book: Gregory Foster, Elizabeth Fox, Beverly Horvit, and Ashley Kannan.

Additionally, the insight of Dennis Crouch, David Kaczynski, and David Skrbina provides the substance for the argument posed in this work.

Finally, to my own brothers, to my own Davids: Niko and Tyler Haas, thank you for everything you do. We don’t get to choose our brothers, but I have been so fortunate as to be able to say thank you for being mine.

Works Cited